Hey,
I'm one of those end-users following development closely. But I rarely post here. I've submitted two bugs in the bugzilla system. One was directly taken up by Lionel and fixed quickly. On the second one I did not get a respond. Here it is (ALSA record problem):
http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2046
Mike Hearn wrote:
It strikes me, looking at the wine-bugs list, that there is a huge disparity between the number of people maintaining it and the number of people filing bugs in it. It seems to be quite rare for communication on bugfixes to take place there, wine-devel is the more usual forum.
Which leads to question I think. Shouldn't it be used more by developers? Should developers not at least try to mark bugs to some state.
So are we misleading users by having a bugzilla into thinking that if they file a bug there, it'll be fixed when it probably won't?
If so, does it matter?
Yes it does. People have a program that's not working (correctly) and want to submit that somewhere. Or ask for help. If there is nowhere to do that (or there is no reply) you'll simply stop users from using Wine. They'll not be encouraged to look for other problems.
A problem is that most Wine users are coming directly from Windows and are not experienced in writing detailed bug reports. And you'll get the "program x is not working, HEEEELPP!!!!1" 'bug'.
That might be the reason developers try to avoid bugzilla. They're tired of this kind of reports.
You could also call Wine not ready for Bugzilla. There are so many bugs that's not needed for users to report bugs. Developers can find them on their own very easy.
If we were to simply drop bugzilla, how would it impact the project?
Well drop it for a period of time, until Wine is more ready for bug reporting. That could be years tough. And I wouldn't like it. It has a bad impact on the project.
I would say, try to have some canned responses for bugs to at least give users the idea someone looked at their bug. And try to fix/assign all bugs that contain usefull information. Some users are able to debug a problem to some extend and then submit a bug to hand over the work they really don't understand.
Kind regards, Paul van Schayck
